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All Rise...

Appellate Judge Tom Becker thinks this movie's a Bozo no-no.

The Charge

Cram it, Clown!

The Case

According to legend, a child uttered those words to beloved clown Bozo on
live television.

According to a different legend, a circus train was on its way to a small
Florida town during a hurricane in 1954. They were crossing a bridge when it
collapsed, sending the train into the bay. By the time the storm cleared, there
were a lot of clowns trapped in a train car at the bottom of the bay. The car
and the bodies were never recovered. Sometimes at night, you can hear calliope
music coming off the water.

Now it's 50 years later, and another hurricane is heading for this same
small town. And people are hearing that calliope. Have the Dead Clowns
returned?

Apparently so, and now they are zombies, but this cheapo indie gives us
little reasoning for their sudden appearance, almost nothing in the way of
scares, and no fleshed-out characters.

We spend the first 25 minutes watching people do not much of anything while
the storm brews (illustrated by clips of hurricanes that look like they were
taken from a VHS recording of The Weather Channel). Since they are all in
different places, there are no interactions and therefore no back stories. We
get the clown legend and a 30-second slasher fantasy induced by a line of
cocaine, and then we finally see some murky shots of the clowns leaving their
watery graves.

We then see a character we've never seen before, some blonde woman. She
hears the calliope music, turns, and sees two of the Dead Clowns in her
house. But these guys don't have clown faces, they have seaweed all over their
heads. We only know they're clowns because we see their big, floppy feet as they
follow her up the stairs very slowly. Courteously, the woman does not scream or
run, she just saunters up the stairs as though she's trying to avoid a buttinsky
neighbor.

As some clowns go after a nearsighted woman and others attack a guy in a
wheelchair, it becomes depressingly clear that we're not going to be seeing
clowns who look like clowns. Some have rock heads, some have skull heads,
there's the occasional rubber nose, fright wig, and funny pants, but the
all-out, white-faced, red-lipped clown look that has terrified children for
centuries is nowhere to be found. What's the point of a scary clown zombie movie
if the zombies don't look like clowns? Why not just call it Dead Clam
Diggers or Dead Orthodontists? I can't believe the budget didn't
allow for clown make up, which in an emergency can be simulated with a jar of
Marshmallow Fluff and a can of V-8.

As the zombie clowns press ever forward, things become quite gory, but the
victims stay curiously silent. Apparently, the sight of the undead in fright
wigs and polka dots isn't enough to make these hardy Floridians holler. And it
seems someone's been loading OxyContin into their water supply, because they are
impervious to pain. Pull out some entrails? Barely a whimper. Gouge out an eye?
Didn't even wince.

Oh, and at around the 50-minute mark, we learn that these clown zombies
don't just kill people, they eat them, too, but since it comes so late, it's
more like an afterthought. It's also not consistent: A plump British woman, who
could have easily fed a family of four clown zombies, is merely left for dead,
while the above-mentioned eyeball is gobbled down like an oyster.

And let's not even get started on how the clown zombies are brought to
hand.

This is just a silly, sloppy gore movie that takes a promising idea and
drops the ball almost from the get-go. Director/writer Steve Sessions
(Malefic) does not use the clown motif at all. These are just
garden-variety zombies armed with hammers, knives, and other tools, rather than
malevolent clowns attacking with tiny parasols or poisonous squirt flowers
(though we do see someone get stomped by a big floppy foot). I didn't count one
solid scare or jump—no clown zombies leaping out of closets or suddenly
illuminated when a candle is lit. The decision to film most of the actors by
themselves merely prevents any character development, and casting Debbie Rochon
(Chicago Massacre: Richard Speck) in
a completely silent part is just a waste.

The film is very low-budget, but Lionsgate doesn't do half-bad with the
transfer, which is letterboxed and probably looks as good as it is going to
look. Audio is Dolby Digital 5.1. Music and hurricane sounds come through
nicely, but there are times that the dialogue (what there is of it) is drowned
out. This could be a problem with the original mix. The only extras are trailers
for Dead Clowns and other Lionsgate offerings (some of which are
clown-themed).

This should have been an exercise in terror; instead, it was tedious and
derivative.